The Ethic of Small

When I lived in San Francisco, there was a Salvadoran shoemaker on Haight Street whose hands move with the precision of someone who has stitched ten thousand soles. I spent weeks photographing him for a handmade, limited edition photobook, watching as he transformed leather and thread into something far more valuable than footwear—he created small monuments to care. Each shoe was a commitment to excellence that would never scale, never go viral, never reach millions. And that was precisely the point.

I think about him often, especially when I encounter the prevailing narrative of our time: that impact must be massive to matter, that reach equals relevance, that millions served means mission accomplished.

I don't believe it. I never have.

The Education of Slowness

My attraction to craftsmanship and excellence has been the quiet thread running through every project I've undertaken. In a Copenhagen underground darkroom, I spent infinite hours creating unique prints using liquid light. The process was painstaking, unpredictable, and completely unscalable. Each print emerged from the chemistry as a singular thing—irreproducible, imperfect, mine. No algorithm could optimize this. No growth hack could accelerate it. The only path to excellence was time, mistakes, and the stubborn refusal to settle for good enough.

This same philosophy animates my kitchen. When I make home-made lasagna for friends and family, I use the original five-hour Bolognese recipe, not because I'm trying to impress anyone, but because the slow reduction of tomatoes and meat into something transcendent cannot be rushed. During my university years in Torino, I threw dinner parties where I replicated the original couscous recipe I learned from a Berber woman on my first trip to Morocco. These weren't performances. They were practices—rituals of care that honored both the tradition I'd inherited and the people I was feeding.

The Japanese have a word for this: ikigai—a reason for being that sits at the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what creates value.

It's about discovering the thing that makes you come alive, and doing it with such devotion that excellence becomes inevitable, not as a destination but as a horizon that pulls you forward every day.

The Heroes Who Sailed

The work I've most enjoyed doing for corporations has always reflected this same ethic, though in a different key. High-impact innovation projects fascinate me precisely because they mirror the structure of craftsmanship: a small, cross-functional team of exceptional people moving at pace through a rich discovery and innovation journey, generating transformational change through depth rather than breadth.

I'm attracted to the stories of heroes who sailed on boats with small crews and discovered new lands after exhausting journeys. Not because I romanticize suffering, but because these narratives understand something essential:

profound change requires intimacy, trust, and the kind of sustained attention that only small groups can maintain.

You cannot discover a new world by committee. You cannot achieve mastery through massive scale.

The Pursuit of Excellence

The pursuit of excellence is not about enforcement or ambition or wealth. It's about adopting what ancient philosophers called a "noble attitude to life"—a commitment to becoming, through deliberate practice and purposeful attention, the best version of what you might be. Excellence is life within life, where exemplarity is maintained through individual commitment to a noble state of mind.

scaling excellence is an oxymoron

True excellence thrives in scarcity, focus, and human connection, and it evaporates the moment you attempt to mass produce it. The Ivy League universities themselves — once seen as sanctuaries of learning and character — are now the failed experiment that proves this point. Their pursuit of scale and prestige has diluted what was once a personal and transformative journey, replacing depth and mentorship with brands, rankings, and transactional success. A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds the absence of excellence. The person who cares only for metrics, for scale, for beating the competition is not in pursuit of excellence but of dominance. These are not the same thing.

When I see people declaring success because their learning platforms have reached millions, I think of a small, dusty workshop where the new Leonardo is born through hard work, through failure after failure until something true emerges. When I see companies pouring millions into ads to attract millions of customers, I think of one-on-one, face-to-face quality conversations where I can make a definite impact—where I can see the transformation happen in real time, in the widening of someone's eyes or the sudden straightening of their posture when understanding arrives.

Why Ten People at a Time

This is why I've chosen to create cohort-based learning experiences that cultivate excellence ten people at a time.

The research is clear: small group learning leads to better academic achievement, deeper relationships, enhanced psychological well-being, and genuine transformation. Once group size increases above six or seven, there is a noticeable reduction in effectiveness. The magic happens in intimacy—in the ability to see each person clearly, to understand their particular struggles and strengths, to create the conditions where peer-to-peer learning becomes transformational rather than transactional.

In a cohort of ten, we can do what is impossible at scale. We can practice deep work—that state of distraction-free concentration that produces true value and builds genuine skill. We can create accountability structures that feel like support rather than surveillance. We can build the kind of trust that allows people to risk failure, to expose their incompetence, to move through the stages of learning without performing expertise they haven't earned.

Cohort-based learning has completion rates of 90%, compared to the 3% completion rates of massive online courses. But this isn't really about completion rates. It's about what completion represents: the transformation of a person who came seeking knowledge and left having built competence, connection, and confidence.

When learners study in groups, an environment is naturally created that encourages interaction, collaboration, and mutual support among peers. Learning becomes more than the acquisition of information—it becomes the cultivation of wisdom through shared struggle and collective discovery.

The Philosophy of Small Scale

E.F. Schumacher understood this when he argued against large-scale technologies in developing countries and instead urged what he called "intermediate technologies"—solutions that take the needs and skills of people into account rather than prescribing a "bigger is better" approach. His philosophy focused on small, simple, and sustainable development, or as he famously put it, "economics as if people mattered".

This is the ethic of small.

It's not that scale doesn't matter. It's that scale without depth is hollow. It's not that reach is unimportant. It's that reach without resonance is noise. The world doesn't need another platform that touches millions with a shallow brush. It needs more spaces where ten people can gather and genuinely transform—where craftsmanship is honored, where excellence is pursued not as a marketing claim but as a daily practice, where mistakes are not failures but necessary stations on the journey toward mastery.

When you work with ten people, you cannot hide behind metrics. You cannot confuse activity with impact. You are confronted, daily, with the irreducible humanity of learning: the frustration, the breakthrough, the consolidation, the forgetting, the remembering. You see what the Slow Food movement has always known—that quality, tradition, and real nourishment cannot be rushed. Food should be good, clean, and fair. So should personal development.

The Horizon of Excellence

The ancient Greeks understood that excellence (arete) was not merely an ethical term but a quality of character to be realized in action. Aristotle said that a craft product, when well designed and produced by a good craftsman, is not merely useful but has elements of balance, proportion, and harmony. Excellence comes not by nature but by exercise, by deliberate practice of particular activities until the habit of doing them is elevated to the level of excellence.

This is why I choose ten people at a time. Because perfect practice—the kind that leads to genuine mastery—requires the intimate feedback loops, the sustained attention, the collaborative problem-solving that only small groups can provide. The pursuit of excellence is not about achieving perfection. It's about letting our best selves show up to do the best work we're meant to do with the best finesse we can learn and muster.

Excellence is not an ideal waiting to be realized. It's a frame of mind. It's a common horizon of exemplarity for all humans. And unlike utopia, which seeks to impose a perfect world, excellence does not impose itself upon others. It invites, it models, it creates the conditions where others can discover their own path toward mastery.

In a small dusty workshop, through hard work and infinite hours, the new Leonardo is born. Not on a platform that reaches millions. Not through an ad campaign that scales. But through the slow, deliberate, intimate work of becoming excellent, one day at a time, one person at a time, ten people at a time.

This is my philosophy. This is my choice. This is the ethic of small.